Genesis

As computer games became more and more complex in the late 1980s, the days of the individual developer seemed to be waning. For a young teenager sitting alone in his room, the dream of creating the next great game by himself was getting out of reach. Yet out of this dilemma these same kids invented a unique method of self-expression, something that would end up enduring longer than Commodore itself. In fact, it still exists today. This was the demo scene.

The genesis of the demo scene started with the Apple ][ in the late 1970s and fully formed with the Commodore 64 a few years later. It started with the battle between game developers and pirates. Companies like Sierra would add newer and cleverer copy protection to their wares to prevent copying, and this challenged the pirates (who were mostly teenagers) to crack the protection. If you were the first to crack a game, you wanted to show off your feat to your friends, so crackers would add a byline with their pseudonyms on the game’s loading screen.

Friendly competition between cracking groups led to an artistic arms race. Instead of just modifying the loading screen, groups started to create their own “intros.” These were little animations that would scroll the names of the group’s members, perhaps with a little music in the background. As the intros got larger and more complicated, they started to rival the size of the games themselves. Eventually, some groups stopped doing the cracking altogether and just packed a single floppy disk with as much of their art, animation, and music as they could. These were the first demos.

Creating the demo scene

Demos required the participation of multiple people, including artists, musicians, and coders, much like a small game studio. Unlike games, however, demos did not (at least at first!) earn their creators any money. For the teenage crackers who became demo creators, this wasn’t a huge issue. Creating a great demo wasn’t about getting paid. It was about recognition from your peers, about amazing your friends by showing them something they didn’t think could be done. This was something greater than money. It was empowering and addictive.

The first demo groups cut their teeth on the Commodore 64, an everyman’s machine that ended its long life after selling 22 million units. When the Amiga arrived, powered by the Motorola 68000 chip, it represented a quantum leap in power over its 8-bit cousins the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum. Demo groups flocked to the new machine with its greater color palette and superior sound. The Amiga’s custom chips were just begging to be explored by clever coders banging directly on the hardware using assembly language for superior speed.

Although the Amiga 1000 was released in 1985, it wasn’t until the more inexpensive Amiga 500 came out in 1987 that kids interested in demos could afford one. Trefor James was one of them.

“I started out with a BBC Model B and then moved onto a Commodore 128,” he explained to me. “When the Amiga 500 first came out, I knew I simply had to have one. It was so hugely ahead of anything else that was around at the time. It changed everything.”

A friend at school gave Trefor some pirated games, most of which had intros from the cracking group on the front of them. He loved the idea of a group of guys (and they always seemed to be guys) who dedicated themselves to the challenge of removing copy protection. He also was intrigued by the idea of scrolltext, where you could communicate with others doing the same thing. A friend, already in the demo scene under the name “Count Zero,” told him that if he liked intros he would love demos. Count Zero then gave him a stack of 3.5-inch floppy disks.

Most of the demos contained phone numbers in the scrolling text in the end credits, and Trefor called some of them up, not knowing what to expect. He found that they were “a bunch of really cool guys” who were just as excited about computers as he was. Before he knew it, he was part of the scene as a mail trader.

In the early days, the primary method of distributing demos was by mail. This proved somewhat impractical as the scene got larger, so trading moved to dial-up modems and bulletin board systems (BBS). This led to a new problem: long-distance phone bills. Traders could have up to 150 contacts with whom they swapped software. Trefor said that monthly phone charges of £400 (more than $1,100 in today’s currency) were not uncommon. For a teenager, it was hard to sustain these bills for very long.

Some people sold their computers to cover the costs, thus exiting the scene forever. Others started trading hacked calling cards. “Virgin” cards were highly sought-after currency as they could be used for up to six to eight weeks. AT&T and MCI were the most common as they provided toll-free 800 numbers in most countries. The top cracking and demo scene BBS would trade in valuable text files describing how to build blue boxes and other “phreaking” tips for hacking the phone exchanges.

Before the Internet, these phreakers were building their own international communications network. Demo group collaboration sometimes extended over oceans. Arctangent, a 19 year-old computer artist living in the US, had contributed some graphical screens for an electronic scene magazine called “Grapevine.” One night at 2am his phone rang. He heard the distant, tinny voice of a British woman asking if “Aaah-tangent” would like to join the demo group LSD. Initially he thought it was a prank call, but they phoned back and insisted that he “Just say yes.”

Running a demo group

Keeping all these far-flung groups of enthusiastic teenagers organized took a very special kind of management. When Count Zero asked Trefor to join the group Anthrox, he jumped at the chance. It wasn't a large group (he was their fifth member) and when Count Zero started winding down his activities, Trefor ended up taking on some of the group's management duties. Much of this activity consisted of finding smaller groups and “consuming” them for their talent. A good way to grab an artist or a coder from a rival group was to bribe them with an offer of a cheap modem. It was a tricky balancing act. Artists and musicians wouldn’t join groups without good coders, and the coders wanted the best artistic talent to make their algorithms shine.

Disputes between groups were inevitable, and while they never got truly nasty, sometimes bad feelings would leak out into the demos themselves. Along with the “greets” to other groups displayed in scrolling, bouncing text, more nasty messages could sneak in. Occasionally a group would release a sub-standard demo “on behalf” of another group they were fighting with. These arguments may seem petty with the benefit of age and hindsight, but they mattered a great deal to the people involved at the time. Sure, in some sense they were typical teenagers, with cliques, in-jokes, and plenty of swearing. But they were also very atypical teenagers, capable of writing highly tuned assembler code that talked directly to the Amiga’s custom chips and made them sing.

Animotion demo from the group Phenomena in 1990

Running a demo group was basically a job that you paid to do. So why would anyone do it? Trefor provided the answer: “What else could you do at such a young age that would let you talk to and meet people from all over the world and have a hand in creating things that were so damn cool?”

Participating in Amiga demoscene back in 1990's was the best time of my life. I think that was the best period to be a computer enthusiast. It felt like your computer had a soul, and the community around it was like nothing I have ever experienced before or after that. Amazing, beautiful, unique, memorable and inspiring times. I'm truly thankful I was given the chance to be a part of it.

You didn't have time to touch on this in the article, but there were two functions that the chipset provided that were responsible for much of its power: the blitter, and the copper.

The blitter just copied things from place to place, without involving the CPU. It was a resource, and an important one, but it was just a tool.

The copper, however, was critically important. It was a very simple processor that was married into the video generation circuitry. The 68000 could write programs for it that would be executed at certain times in the video frame. The copper was able to do simple things itself, and particularly was able to instruct the blitter to do things for it. The 68000 could, for instance, set up a palette shift on every line. This allowed high resolution pictures, which were normally limited to sixteen colors, to have a unique sixteen colors per line. In low resolution, you could have 32 colors per line, which were all handled by the copper and blitter working in tandem. The computer could be shifting color palette on every line going down the screen, without involving the 68000 at all. Now, this put a hell of a load on that subsystem, and you couldn't also play a game at the same time, but you could display some mighty nice still pictures.

And that's just one example; a good copper program could work magic. Another simple example allowed for sprite reuse, moving the sprites down the screen as the raster beam passed them, and changing them into something else, so that the 8 native hardware sprites could appear to be many more. The OS itself had support for doing this for you, though of course it was faster to hand-write your copper routines.

Being married that intensely with its video hardware gave the Amiga unbelievably advanced capabilities for the time. Modern computers have beaten it on raw speed by many orders of magnitude, but the ancient, ancient Amiga still managed to win a demo contest twenty years after its hardware was first introduced.

There has never been a computer like it. There never will be again. Many of the computing functions you're used to came from that machine. It had the first recognizably modern operating system in the home market, with multitasking, and storage and filesystem and print drivers, and later even generalized network drivers.

If you were forced to sit down and use a computer from that era, the Amiga would feel the most like what you use today. It would be awkward and irritating in the extreme, and so slooooooooow, but you could kinda-sorta use it just like you use a Windows PC today. A Mac or a PC, particularly the PC, would require much more adaptation.

The Amiga evangelists, and they were legion, were right. They were, in many ways, using a computer from the year 2000, but they had it in 1985.

I remember seeing one particular demo from farbrausch way back when, and it was absolutely amazing stuff. The end of that demo they were filling up with shout-outs and text to use up the leftover space they had.

If you were forced to sit down and use a computer from that era, the Amiga would feel the most like what you use today. It would be awkward and irritating in the extreme, and so slooooooooow, but you could kinda-sorta use it just like you use a Windows PC today. A Mac or a PC, particularly the PC, would require much more adaptation.

Great article. I will say though that starting it with "Genesis" and then immediately talking about the late 80's put the Sega Genesis into the back of my mind, and on some level I kept waiting for it to come up. Bad voice of word.

Wow, that twigged me to remembering Aegis Sonix, the first major competitor for Deluxe Music. I remember downloading a song for that, which had an actual human voice singing. It was a good song, too! But the sample rate was very low, so I never did quite understand the lyrics.

That was seriously mindblowing stuff, boys and girls. You had this machine sitting on your desk, and along with all the other cool stuff it could do, it could sing. With real music accompaniment! In the era of bleeps and bloops, this was exciting.

Awesome article and I got a mention in it too -- woot! I still have very fond memories of the Amiga, and like malor said above "They were , in many ways, using a computer from 2000, but they had it in 1985".

I recently bought an A3000 (well, a few) on eBay and have been able to get a pretty clean machine from the various parts. It's a bit of retro self-indulgence: I had an A500 and always wanted a 3000 back in the day. All I need is a decent VGA LCD that matches 90s-PC beige.

What's impressive about the Amiga, stated so eloquently above, is that's is so impressively contemporary. You could use one today and get reasonable results out of it. I dug out some of my older disks and it's truly amazing what you could do with a home machine, both in terms of demos (SpaceBalls' State of the Art still ran; that was an eye-opener in the day) games---but I was amazed that I could still make use of Art Department Pro, DigiPaint (I still miss DigiPaint), AmigaVision and Pen Pal. Even DeluxePaint was a pleasant surprise; a reminder of an era when EA wasn't nearly the evil incarnate it is now.

Considering that the A500 was sorta-kinda the contemporary of the IBM PC/AT and the Macintosh SE/30 (both of which cost a lot more and did a lot less) it's just heartbreaking that it didn't survive. It was just so far ahead of it's time, and it seems like Commodore really had to try to fail.

I never got too much into the demo scene somehow back in the day, but I was aware of Skaven and his amazing music. I spent far too many nights analyzing his music and countless other .mod files in the trackers that would follow over the years. To think the music these guys were able to make with 4 and 8 channels just gives me the chills (and makes me incredibly jealous that I had nowhere near the talent of these guys). I would love a "Where are they now?" Article for some of the more popular composers or the time, if for nothing else to know what the guys who inspired me at age 15 looked like.

My father subscribed to a few Amiga demos. I'd say he was pretty involved, he was a programmer, and we'd get disks in the mail. It was fun to go through them. All I remember was, you'd pop the disk in and this huge icon came up for the disk, it was real gnarly. Some had games and that was what got the attention of my brothers and I. Some had music/media creation software, but a lot of it was programming stuff we passed over. I played an Asteroids clone that may have come from one of those, because no Amiga gaming buff I've ever met has been able to identify it. And no, it is not Blasteroids.

If anyone wants to take a swing at it... Pretty typical Asteroids clone. You could rotate the ship, shoot, or thrust. You could also hyperspace, which instantly transported you to any other location on the screen (including on top of an enemy or in its path). Flying through any wall made you come out the other side. All "levels" were just one screen, usually with a planet or something like that in the background. Each level was defined by its enemies. In addition to rocks and aliens, there was an enemy called "Monoliths" which floated aimlessly like rocks, but took a few dozen shots to destroy. They were basically dark metal planks. Sometimes you would just get three of them, and it was a real pain. After so many levels, you would switch to a "Lunar Lander" type thing where you had to land your ship in a spot, and you had to do it perfectly in the allotted time. Only other thing I remember was the difficulty selection, there were three icons, and you had control of the ship, and as soon as you touched one, the game would suck you up to the top of the screen (same thing happened when you finished any level). Since the icons were in a pyramid layout, if you came at either of the bottom two just right, the thing sucking you up would pull you through the top one as well, and you'd pick up both of them. I don't know what effect this had, but we tried for it every time.

malor wrote:

The Amiga evangelists, and they were legion, were right. They were, in many ways, using a computer from the year 2000, but they had it in 1985.

I want to agree with you, but I can't. My father was one of those Amiga evangelists... and he said the Amiga would put both IBM (or maybe Microsoft?) and Apple out of business. He was so sure how much better the Amiga was than the Mac or the IBM (or clone) out at the time. And he was convincing. But I never really believed it. And look where Amiga is now. I wish it were bigger. At least as big as Linux. Maybe even a third competitor between Mac and PC. Our Amiga 1000 did things that Windows, today, does not do. The two-stage (idle and active) icons, the cursor editor in Prefs, the disk space/remaining on each window, the CLI window below the desktop, having two separate save games by simply duplicating the game's icon, and games that would boot from disk. Also how icons could be huge. It was a great computer way back then.

The Amiga evangelists, and they were legion, were right. They were, in many ways, using a computer from the year 2000, but they had it in 1985.

I want to agree with you, but I can't. My father was one of those Amiga evangelists... and he said the Amiga would put both IBM (or maybe Microsoft?) and Apple out of business. He was so sure how much better the Amiga was than the Mac or the IBM (or clone) out at the time. And he was convincing. But I never really believed it. And look where Amiga is now.

You are confusing the hardware with the business. The hardware was amazing. It ran rings around PCs and Macs. It truly was like technology from the future. It really was orders of magnitude better than anything PC-folks or Apple could throw at it.

But then there was the business. Commodore had an awesome product, and they really screwed up. They rested on their laurels, they made really stupid bets (hello CDTV!) and they squandered their opportunity. They had the best product in the market, and they screwed it up.

I never owned an Amiga. Yet this series is one of my favourite, or THE favourite, of all Ars series. It's is just so well written and the story is so interesting, it's a very compelling read. Maybe for me even more so because for me it deals with a part of computer history that I didn't know, but that happened in parallel with a lot of the history I do know.

I thought about this series only yesterday, while reading something else on Ars, great that it continues now. And like others, I can't believe that it was as long as 5 years ago...

There was a game which had its origins in the demo scene, that was a fully 3-D shooter which relied heavily on procedural generation of textures and animations in order to fit a sizable game in a package less than 100kb.The graphics are still strong to this day, and it was quite fun.

This is where I first saw "l33t" speak also. WAY before I saw it in video games on the PC. When I saw people doing it then, I always thought of the Amiga doing it 10 years before that with these demos and "kracks".

The Germans seemed particularly adept at making game cracks and putting their demo signatures at the beginning of games.

Hm. That Starstruck demo came out in 2006, and Portal came out in 2007. I wonder if the artistic influence is mutual inspiration from a common antecedent, or if the demo influenced the game? The similarities are certainly striking.

Yes! Been waiting so long for this series to continue - I was afraid it was never gonna happen.

I was on the outskirts of the demo scene back then. Not involved - but knowing a couple of people that were as trader and composer respectively. It really was amazing to watch, even if a small part of me always felt that demos were kind of a artistic masturbation that could sometimes get almost embarrassing to watch. Still the good ones - the really good ones - left you completely in awe of the people that could create something like that.

Also watching that Starstruck demo I was for some reason reminded of Final Fantasy - not a specific one, just something about the style in general. Perhaps that's part of the reason I love that series even when the storytelling goes crap, and the game play is mediocre - the visual style reminds me a bit of the old demos

Wow...as someone who's never even seen any of this scene, known anything of it...just...wow. Awesome. I would have really loved to do this kind of stuff had I been part of that generation, but I ended up with a PC instead.

I do remember though - the style within games and videos - especially ones from smaller companies, was always more of that mathematically constructed one, instead of heavily artistically imported into the computer - and it had a beauty that really drew me in. Something that reminded me that there was complex, amazing beauty to both mathematics and to programming. It's a shame we don't see more of that these days.

One of the things that impressed me the most about was that it started almost instantly, loading from a single 880kB floppy disk on a 8MHz machine.

Unfortunately, I was nowhere near good enough of a programmer to join the demo scene - I remember typing source code from books to get a few copper bars show up on my screen, but that's about as far as it went for me back then. Later I did use an A4000 to write a MOD soundtrack for a PC demo though.

Four guys from the group The Silents created the pinball game Pinball Dreams which launched their company, Digital Illusions. A bunch of games later they are now known as DICE, creators of the Battlefield series.

A bunch of demosceners founded the company The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) where they put their expertise in creating graphical effects for resource constrained systems to use. They helped create interface graphics and effects for a number of mobile manufacturers, including early versions of Android. They are now owned by Blackberry and are allegedly largely responsible for the interface of the new Blackberry OS.

The Amiga evangelists, and they were legion, were right. They were, in many ways, using a computer from the year 2000, but they had it in 1985.

I want to agree with you, but I can't. My father was one of those Amiga evangelists... and he said the Amiga would put both IBM (or maybe Microsoft?) and Apple out of business. He was so sure how much better the Amiga was than the Mac or the IBM (or clone) out at the time. And he was convincing. But I never really believed it. And look where Amiga is now.

You are confusing the hardware with the business. The hardware was amazing. It ran rings around PCs and Macs. It truly was like technology from the future. It really was orders of magnitude better than anything PC-folks or Apple could throw at it.

But then there was the business. Commodore had an awesome product, and they really screwed up. They rested on their laurels, they made really stupid bets (hello CDTV!) and they squandered their opportunity. They had the best product in the market, and they screwed it up.

Yes, I'm bitter. Damn it!

No, I'm not confused. I may have been unclear. But I agree with everything you said. I know the hardware was better. Gates was saying you needed 8MB of RAM to multitask. Our Amiga 1000 did it with 512k of RAM, and would have done it with the stock 256k. We had the memory module in the front.

Ah, I see the confusion. I said "He was so sure the Amiga was better." What I meant was, he was so sure that that would be everything, or at least enough to put Apple and Microsoft/IBM out of business. At 11-13 I just knew Commodore would not keep up. Don't know how I knew. I wasn't reading business magazines or anything. I was aware the Amiga was better. I just knew it wouldn't matter. I believe Betamax had advantages over VHS. I know LaserDisc and VideoCD did. The top Android phones have only just begun to outsell the top iPhone. And to top it all off, the Wii outsold Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and gaming PCs. (That's cheap. Gaming PCs don't really rate against consoles. They're more often built, and that's harder to track. But it legitimately beat the other two, and without an HD option.) I have long seen that the hare does not always beat the tortoise.

I went to a demo meet in Canberra many years ago. I wasn't into 68k coding but one of my friends was. Still, there was plenty of pirate game trading, VHS-porn copying, game playing and other stuff to do. The big drama was that at the final judging the whisper was going around that one of the coders was actually a lamer that had paid for his sine scroll routine! Great times. I remember the greets that were in every scroll text and particularly the flames - "fuckings to the phantom" finished one demo's text, and I felt almost famous because I knew someone who went by phantom. Maybe not the same one though that didn't occur to me until years later.